The present invention generally relates to digitally represented graphics and more particularly to improving the performance of generating digitally represented graphics.
In the 1980's and 1990's, display adapters for computers and game consoles appeared with graphics accelerators, offloading the Central Processing Unit (CPU) in graphics generation. Initially, the display adapters offered acceleration of 2D graphics, but eventually they also included support for accelerated 3D graphics. Modern display adapters use a processing unit often named a graphics processing unit (GPU).
Due to the complexity of 3D graphics, GPU's use a significant amount of their processing power to perform calculations related to 3D graphics. There are always new applications and games requiring higher frame rates (rendered screen images per second), higher resolutions and higher image quality, resulting in requirements that each screen image should be rendered in as short a time as possible. In other words, it is always important to increase performance.
Performance may be increased by increasing the processing power of the GPU's by enabling higher clock speeds, pipelining, or exploiting parallel computations. However, this often generates more heat, resulting in more power consumption and higher fan noise for cooling the GPU. Moreover, there are limits to the clock speeds of each GPU.